RUNE
“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” Gideon’s voice echoed behind her.
All right?
She was livid.
They were on the third floor, glancing into open doorways, looking for the nursery. Edmund was long gone, and had likely found them missing by now. They needed to hurry.
Gideon caught up to her, his long strides keeping pace with her furious ones.
“Does it upset you?” he asked. “Does what upset me?”
“That a curse makes it impossible for us to be together?”
Be together.
As if, just maybe, he wanted that.
The thought was a spark. One flaring into a fire, warming Rune from the inside out.
“Why should it upset me?” She kept her gaze straight ahead, not wanting him to see the truth in her eyes. “We could never have been together even if you weren’t cursed.” She kept walking. There were only three more doorways before this hall ended. “You hunt my kind, remember?”
You’re hunting us even now. You’re only pretending to help me so you can kill Cressida, her army, and the Roseblood heir.
Gideon reached for her arm, coaxing her to a stop and turning her to face him. “On the Arcadia,” he said, watching her closely, “you said you would have married me, had I asked.”
She saw the unspoken question in his eyes: Is that still true?
Rune clenched her fists. She never should have admitted that. The only thing saving her from the humiliation of that admission was that he didn’t seem to believe her.
Do not tell him the truth. Do the opposite of that. The truth will only get you killed.
Rune had already made the mistake of letting down her guard with Gideon—and as a result, she’d ended up on the purging platform. She couldn’t do it again. Just because she didn’t repulse Gideon didn’t mean he loved her.
He might be in lust with her, but that wasn’t love. People who loved you didn’t plot to betray you. Didn’t try to hunt you down or wipe out your kind.
She removed his hand from her arm. “I think we should focus on—”
Somewhere down the hall, a child started crying. Rune and Gideon glanced toward the sound: the last door on the right. Rune doubled her pace, with Gideon close behind her. When she found the door open, she stepped into the room.
A young woman stood near the window overlooking the harbor. She swayed back and forth, trying to calm the red-haired toddler in her arms. Meadow, Gideon had told her.
The moment the nursemaid sighted Rune, she stopped swaying.
“Who are you?” The woman drew the child closer. The crying increased.
“This is Captain Sharpe.” Rune began to close the distance between them. “And I’m … it doesn’t matter. We have orders to bring the child to the palace.”
The nursemaid stepped back, increasing the distance between herself and Rune. “You’ll have to take that up with my mistress. She’s the child’s legal guardian.”
Rune cocked her head. Legal guardian?
It was a practice started after the revolution: taking children away from witches and giving them to non-witches to raise. Usually forever, in cases
where the mothers were dead or in hiding.
Rune had burned with anger when it was first put into effect. She burned with that same anger now.
“Our orders come from the Commander himself,” said Rune, continuing forward.
The woman backed up again, straight into the windowsill. The crib stood beside her, its cloud mobile dancing softly in the breeze.
“I-I can’t give her to you without permission.”
Rune, who knew they were running out of time, drew her gun. “That child doesn’t belong to you.”
She almost heard Gideon’s scowl. She was totally blowing their cover. Rune didn’t care.
“Your mistress is a thief, and that child belongs with her mother.”
The servant’s eyes widened at the gun, then flicked to Gideon as he moved to Rune’s side.
“Better do as she says.” Gideon held out his hands, stepping forward to take the child, who was watching them all with fearful blue eyes, her cries getting louder. “She’s unpredictable with that thing.”
Rune threw him a glare before cocking the gun, her gaze returning to the woman.
“You have three seconds before I shoot,” said Rune.
Reluctantly, she handed Meadow to Gideon, who tucked her inside his coat so Witch’s Armor could protect her. As he retreated behind Rune, she heard him make small shushing noises.
The moment Rune followed him into the hall, the servant screamed for help.
“Intruders!” Her voice shattered the silence. “Help! HELP!” Rune winced.
Soon, this floor would be swarming with guards.
Instead of returning the way they came, Gideon made for the servants’ stairs. Rune followed, glancing over her shoulder before they descended.
Men in uniforms were heading straight for them. “Go!” she said, pushing him faster.
He flew down the steps. The stairwell ended in the basement, near the kitchens—or so Rune assumed, judging by the sound of clattering pots and the smell of cooking onions.
Hoping Gideon knew where he was going, Rune ran after him, passing startled staff while guards thundered down the steps behind them. Gideon burst through a set of doors and together they stumbled into a massive dining room. Sunlight streamed in through the tall windows, illuminating dozens of tables set with white tablecloths. Two servants pushing dish-laden carts halted at the sight of them.
“There,” said Rune, nodding to a door that led toward the front of the house.
But as they raced toward it, ignoring the servants, the doors ahead opened and several guards flooded in. Gideon halted. Rune turned back only to find more pursuers entering the doors they’d just come through.
Gideon and Rune looked to the windows. But even if they reached them, opened them, they’d be picked off before they climbed out. Already, bullets were flying. Whizzing past their heads.
One hit her shoulder. The force of it knocked her back a step. The bullet bounced off, leaving only a sting—and likely a bruise—where it hit.
At least Witch’s Armor was holding.
Rune fired back, but couldn’t tell if she hit them. She was too busy following Gideon toward the windows.
While cradling the child hidden inside his jacket with one hand, he used the other to flip a table on its side, sending a glass vase full of flowers shattering to the floor and shielding them from the guards on one side. He did the same with a second table, angling it toward the other set of guards.
Grabbing Rune’s arm, he pulled her down to the floor, protecting her from the gunfire. They were safe, temporarily. But trapped. With armed guards at both exits, they couldn’t run for the windows.
“Here,” he said calmly, untucking Meadow from his coat and giving her to Rune. “Give me your gun.”
Rune handed him her revolver and pulled the child into her lap, holding her close and softly shushing her the way Gideon had beneath the flying bullets.
When the gunfire stopped, Gideon got up from his knees to look, then raised his gun and fired in both directions, ducking down immediately after. The return fire came fast and furious. Frightened, Meadow trembled.
Rune hugged her tightly, humming a song—one of Alex’s—while Gideon used his body to shield them. Rune shut her eyes, listening to the sounds of bullets splintering wood and ricocheting off walls. Trying to think of a spell to get them out of this.
But her mind was a sheet of ice. Blank with fear.
With the arrival of reinforcements, the gunfire intensified. Gideon’s gloved hand cupped Rune’s head, pressing her face into his shoulder. He kept her head down and out of danger as they sheltered the child between their two bodies.
“You’ll be with your mother soon,” he told Meadow, whose little arms were locked around Rune’s neck. Gideon’s voice was warm and steady despite everything falling apart around them. As if he knew precisely how to soothe frightened children even if he was also frightened. As the eldest of three, he probably did. “I won’t let you get hurt. That’s a promise.”
But how could he promise such a thing? They were sitting ducks. If they got out of here at all, it would be in shackles.
But the warmth of his voice, the certainty of his words, thawed Rune’s fear.
Why does he have to be so damn heroic?
It made her wonder, just for a second, what he would be like with his own children.
At that thought, a strange thing happened. An image flared before her eyes, like a waking dream. She saw a much older Gideon, playing with children. She saw it so clearly, it stole her breath.
In her vision, Gideon was maybe ten years older and chasing three children. She knew the children were his, because two had his eyes, and the third his stern mouth. The children fled through a field full of wildflowers, shrieking and laughing, trying to evade him, while Gideon pretended to let them.
The way this future Gideon beamed made Rune’s heart ache. The infectious sound of his laugh made her throat prickle. She’d seen him this
happy only once before, for the briefest of moments, on the night they spent together in his bed.
Whether the vision was her own imagining or she was seeing into the future the way some witches could, she didn’t know. It had never happened before.
Who was he married to? Who was the mother of those children? If there was a wife, Rune didn’t see her.
The vision vanished like a sudden gale moving on to fill the sails of other ships, leaving Rune disoriented and stranded in the dining hall, the bang! bang! bang! of bullets hurting her ears, the acrid smell of gunpowder burning her nose as enemy shouts surrounded them on both sides.
“This is what it would be like,” she realized aloud, her fist clutching the lapel of Gideon’s jacket as her forehead pressed against his shoulder.
He tilted his head toward her. “What?”
“You and me. A witch and a witch hunter.” She pulled away to search his face, still holding Meadow tight. “If you and I were together, they’d hunt us to the ends of the earth.” She glanced down at the defenseless child in her lap. More quietly, she said, “Along with any children we might have.”
As the bullets whizzed overhead, Gideon fell silent, staring at her. His hand still cupped the back of her head.
“Do you want children?” His voice was strangely quiet, at odds with the ruckus.
Rune’s stomach tumbled over itself.
Why did I say that?
In truth, she’d never given much thought to her future. Never really believed she would have one. Rune had always expected to be caught and purged, if not today, then tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, at some point thereafter.
She still expected it.
But his question clanged through her.
What kind of future did she want? Would it involve children? A family?
It seemed preposterous to consider. She was too young. Not to mention hunted at every turn. The world was too deadly a place.
But if it wasn’t?
If she were older, and the world was different? “I—”
Gideon reached for her chin suddenly, drawing her gaze to his. He frowned, searching her eyes. “Rune … did you See something?”
“What?”
“Your eyes—”
A bullet whizzed past and sank into the wooden table behind them.
Gideon pulled away as if he’d been hit, hissing in pain.
Rune looked up to find blood seeping through his shirt near his shoulder.
“Gideon!”
He touched the blood with his glove, his jaw clenching. “It’s just a graze. I’ll be fine.”
Rune was about to say it didn’t look like a graze when movement made her glance over his shoulder. Edmund—the soldier she’d flirted with earlier
—stood a few paces behind Gideon, his gun raised.
Rune lifted her pistol and fired first, sending a bullet into Edmund’s leg. He grunted and grabbed for the wound. She fired again, forcing him out of sight.
“There’s too many of them.”
Gideon nodded. “Can you use that invisibility spell to get Meadow out of here?”
“What about you?” Rune frowned at the blood spreading across his shirt, hoping he was telling the truth: that it wasn’t serious.
“I’ll hold them off while you escape. If we all disappear, they’ll know we’re still in the room and shoot widely. But if I don’t let them get close enough to see I’m alone, they’ll think my gunfire is covering you. They’ll focus their aim on me while you escape out the windows.”
He was telling her to go without him. “But how will you get out?”
He pulled a small leather satchel out of his pocket. “Don’t worry about that.” After digging his hand into it, his fist emerged full of bullets. They
clinked and rolled as he dumped them on the floor, making them easier to grab and load. “Take Comrade and ride for Old Town. Wait for me there.”
“But—”
“The key to my tenement is in my breast pocket,” he said, loading his gun as enemy fire whizzed past overhead.
There was no way he’d be able to get past all those guards alone. “I can’t just leave you here!”
“Rune.” Her name pulled her gaze to his. “For once in your damn life, don’t fight me.”
The steely look in his eyes brooked no argument. Rune glared back, knowing he was right—this was the only way to get Meadow out.
But …
Rune threw her arms around his neck, hugging him hard. “Promise me you’ll stay alive.”
When she released him, Gideon blinked in surprise. “I’ll be fine.”
It was the best she was going to get. So Rune retrieved the key from his pocket and dropped it into her own. She’d have to trust him. He was a Blood Guard captain. They wouldn’t kill him.
Right?
The sound of splintering wood burst in her ears. Soon the bullets would be coming through the tables shielding them.
Balancing Meadow against her chest, Rune grabbed her casting knife and made two small cuts near the back of her ankle. Using the blood beading on her skin, she drew the symbols for Ghost Walker, first on the back of Meadow’s neck, then on her own wrist.
“Go,” said Gideon when the spell took effect.
He stood up and started shooting with both guns.
Rune hugged Meadow close as she moved for the windows, staying low to the ground. Arriving at the nearest one, she waited for Gideon to reload and start firing before unlatching and swinging it open.
With all attention in the room fixed on the Blood Guard captain, she lifted Meadow into the window frame, then followed her up.
After dropping down into the gardens below, Rune carried Meadow right through the front gates, slipping unseen past the house guards now on high alert as the sound of gunfire echoed in the house beyond them.
She headed for the water, where Gideon’s horse waited, glancing back only once at the yellow house.
You better know what you’re doing.
Untying Comrade from his post, she mounted, then kicked the horse into a canter, leaving her heart behind in that dining room, with the boy risking his life so she and a child could escape.
